At Szydlowiec, seventeen miles south of Radom, I saw the first signs of devastation, but these were not the work of the advancing Russian artillery but had been perpetrated deliberately by the retreating Germans. The tower of the town hall was crumbled to ruins. The church is not large, but has a high pointed roof, of which the open woodwork still remains, with the cupola as if caught astride of it in its fall. Inside, the beautiful painted inner roof is mutilated, but the monuments of the ancient Szydlowiecki family, and notably the graceful figure of a sleeping woman, have for the most part escaped. The floor was covered with rubbish and the damage is estimated at a very high figure. While I was in the church, the dignified old priest entered with six young men, who knelt with faces full of reverence before they set to work to clear the nave of rubbish. The Pole who told me the story of the ruin of the church told it quietly but with flashing eyes. He said the inhabitants asked rather that the whole town should be destroyed and the church be left standing. The only excuse was a few shots from the advancing Russian infantry and artillery, and there was no regular fighting there, the Germans making no resistance and retreating too quickly to blow up the castle.
After Szydlowiec, the Cracow road on its way to Kielce (twenty-seven miles) passes through country of quite a different character. A long rise, and we were now close up among the troops. At one point the long train of wagons branched away to a village on our left, and out of it by another road there came in another stream of fighting men. We passed some two hundred Austrian prisoners in their blue shakos and uniforms; they were all Poles, with hardly any guard but giving no trouble; one of them courteously stepped out of the ranks to pick up my field glass, which I had dropped. These men, who talked freely to us, did not look at all miserable, only confused. The Russians behaved to them as to their own people.
At last we came to the hills above Kielce. It was now clear what had happened. Troops of all kinds were streaming into the town and all resistance was over. On the main street we were stopped for a few moments by a general and his staff. At the chief hotel large parties of officers were sitting down to lunch. All the streets were full of movement, but with no sign of any conflict or friction—horses, dismounting messengers, soldiers eating, talking or resting, the townspeople standing watching, satisfying the requirements or questions of the newcomers or joining in their talk. We had no difficulty in securing good rooms, and our lunch was as good as it would have been in Warsaw. Many of the troops had passed or were passing on along the broad road in the direction of Cracow. Mounting the high hill south-west of the town we could see the scattered stream of men, horses and carts going forward past pleasant houses, hills and villages, and the thunder of artillery came to us from beyond a ridge in the distance. Our plans, however, prevented us from going further. At the hotel the regiment which had done most of the fighting was sitting at dinner and singing the regimental song and the national hymn. The song began with a Mahometan word, "God has given us victory."
Next day, November 4, with villagers guiding and recounting to us, we went over the scene of the last Austrian resistance about six miles east of Kielce. A long curving line of rifle pits ran over a broad high front; sometimes the line ran along the inside of an extensive copse of small fir trees; some of the pits contained extemporised pallets of fir boughs, in others were bullets, weapons or even letters. The Russian advance was indicated by two hostile lines running almost side by side, where within a few yards I picked up undischarged bullets of the two armies. In a little wooded cemetery on the bare ridge lay a number of bodies, Austrian and Russian, brought in by the villagers for burial. It was not a sight to dwell on; but one thing that I shall not forget was the body of a young Austrian of not more than twenty, full of grace and beauty, the head thrown back, the breast bared, and the hand lifted as if waving on the attack. Outside, other bodies were still being brought in, the Russians greatly predominating in numbers. Some Austrian wounded still walked about the village. One, with whom I spoke, had the lower part of his jaw bound up and complained that he could drink nothing. He was greatly depressed but had no rancour and evidently felt at home with the villagers, who were of the same blood and behaved to him rather as people would to an interesting traveller in their midst. He was a Pole from no further off than Cracow, where he was a master—"professor" as he put it—in a secondary school, a very intelligent and educated man who seemed quite out of place in a uniform and on a battlefield. He told me how they replied all day as best they could to a cross fire, till in the evening the Russians came on them shouting "Hurrah!" A day earlier, and we should have seen this fight. The Germans had left them in the lurch—"as they always do," he added. It was in the main a battle of Poles against Poles. He himself was a "Pan-Slavist," he told me, but could not say so because of his post. If the Russians got Cracow and maintained the appointment of Polish civil officials there, including a Polish Governor, as at present, he felt certain that all western Galicia would be on their side. I left him a little tobacco and took the address of one of his colleagues in Cracow. Heavy firing from the south was all the time audible.
We returned to Kielce, passing regiments of all kinds. On our way back to Radom my motor broke down, and after sitting for three hours amidst marshy ground, with wounded; transports and villagers passing and occasionally hearing stray rifle shots, I had to return again to Kielce for the night. The discomfort of this contretemps disappeared before the unconquerable wit and good humour of my French colleague, M. Naudeau, who improvised little songs on our mishap.
The next day, the 5th, there was nothing left but to return to Radom, occupying three seats which a Russian general, a man of charming simplicity, kindly put at our disposal in his motor. The strength of the Russian advance was everywhere before our eyes. The great stream was still flowing on. There were troops of all kinds—we inquired the name of each regiment, which they always gave in a kind of jovial chorus; there were food transports, field kitchens, pontoons and, not least important, the post. At one point we saw a large body of Austrian prisoners sitting by a wood and drinking water with their very small escort. These men helped some of our motors over difficult places. Streams, their bridges broken down, were still being crossed by the great onflowing current of men and wagons, only with more ardour than before. Teams of white horses, which, because of their conspicuousness, are only allowed to serve in the transport, were dashing through the mud and water with a fervour as great as if on the field of battle. At one place a bread wagon dropped all its cargo and turned over on its side, but horse and driver, evidently not noticing, carried it on into the stream with no diminution of pace—one wheel high in the air and the other broken beneath the wagon. Our General spoke frequently with the men; and we all helped one another through difficult places, on each occasion with a hearty "Once more thank you, brothers," from the General. Nothing will remain with me longer than these endless irregular lines of big, sleepy, almost stupid-looking faces moving at a walk which might last for ever, and all in one direction and all with set eyes, a people that lies down to sleep at the roadside, that breakfasts off stale biscuit soaked in water, that carries nothing but what it can put to a hundred uses, that will crouch for days without food in flooded trenches, that can die like flies for an idea, and is sure, sooner or later, to attain it, a people that never complain, a brotherhood of men.
In Radom I found our Russian orderly from Kostroma fraternising with the Polish servants, joining in their work and singing them songs of the Volga. I told him he was another Susanin who had led the foreigners into the marsh. We were soon on our way back to Warsaw.
November 25.
I have dealt with the Russian advance from Warsaw and Ivangorod, by which the Russian front was carried forward some one hundred and seventy miles in all from the original defensive line on the Bug and the communications of the Austrian and German armies were threatened in the neighbourhood of Cracow. This movement was necessarily completed by an advance of the Russian forces on the San.